Main menu

Post navigation

Why vultures deserve respect

This bearded vulture has developed an incredibly cunning method of eating carcass bone marrow – although patience is a virtue as this bone breaking technique can take seven years to perfect! Another amazing nature video from the wild African desert. From the BBC.

Bald, ugly birds with a gruesome taste for gore or charismatic creatures that do an essential but thankless job in the ecosystem?

However we perceive them, one thing is clear about vultures – they are in trouble.

In India, Nepal and Pakistan populations have plummeted by 95% in the last decade and the pattern is being mirrored across Africa.

The birds are being poisoned through the carcasses they clear up. While some of this is the result of medication in livestock, other cases suggest intentional foul play by poachers that target the birds so they don’t alert wardens to dead rhinos and elephants.

Conservationists such as Simon Thomsett are working to raise awareness of the birds’ plight and change attitudes towards them by highlighting their unique adaptations.

1. Highest flyers

The highest bird flight ever recorded was by a Ruppell’s vulture which impacted an aircraft at 37,000ft over the Ivory Coast in 1973. This is well above the height of Everest (29,029 ft) and the lack of oxygen would kill most other birds.

“Since then studies on this vulture revealed a number of features in their haemoglobin and a number of cardio-vascular adaptations that allow breathing in rarefied atmosphere,” explains Mr Thomsett.

Vultures routinely soar high in the air, using thermals to get a wide view of the plains so they can find food.

3. Borders are not boundaries

The international team of researchers found that instead of closely following the mass migration of wildebeest through the Masai Mara, the birds sought out their prey in the dry season when they were most vulnerable due to drought.

Around the BBC

The plight of India’s vulture populations, and their rapid decline due to the use of the drug diclofenac in cattle, is well documented. What’s less known is revealed in a new documentary (shown tonight, 31 January, in England and Wales and tomorrow, 1 February, in Scotland) in which renowned wildlife photojournalist and cameraman, Charlie Hamilton James, travels to East Africa to learn that vultures there are similarly declining at an alarming rate, but for a different reason: here.